In February 2026, India hosted the India AI Impact Summit 2026, that sought to put the needs and challenges of the Global South at the centre of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) discourse. The summit’s themes framed by India were rooted in the contextual realities of the Global South with a focus on real-world harms. This was a departure from the previous summits (at Bletchley Park, 2023, U.K.; Seoul 2024, and Paris 2025) that prioritised both catastrophic and existential risks over questions of present harms, equity and inclusion.
As the Summit evolved, the political and policy momentum shifted toward raising capital for AI development in India and accelerating adoption through domestic use cases. In this process, India increasingly began to position itself within the newly framed “middle power” discourse, at the cost of Global South solidarity which underpinned the Summit’s original vision. India clarified this stance by joining Pax Silica, signalling strategic alignment with the United States-dominated semiconductor supply chain. As part of the agreement, India agreed to adopt a pro-innovation regulatory approach, thereby compromising its pursuit of strategic autonomy.
Middle power dilemma
This repositioning of India’s geopolitical character, as a middle power, has left it in a lonely corner. The middle power narrative is diplomatically attractive but strategically uneasy. India’s aspirations to be positioned alongside European and Asian countries such as Japan, which do not consider India a peer in technological capability or economic development, is also in dissonance with its colonial past and low per capita — realities that firmly anchor India within the Global South.
Accompanying the friction between India’s ambition and its realities is the U.S.’s foreign policy push for global AI adoption of U.S. tech, bringing into question whether it will be a reliable partner in the AI adventure to India. The U.S. has declared its disinterest in AI governance, especially global multilateral or multistakeholder governance. This raises fundamental questions for India and the Global South on concentration of infrastructure, and economic power in the U.S. Will this be a repeat of the social media story — when U.S. foreign policy pushed back against regulating for user harms to safeguard the interests of social media platforms concentrated in the U.S.? Furthermore, economic value primarily accrues to American industry despite significant business and users outside its borders, while disproportionate externalities and harms also persist in domestic markets.
Pertinent issues
In the AI story, numerous questions arise. Will India mainly be a consumer of U.S. tech with Indian users bearing disproportionate harm? Will India be a site for extraction of data, labour for data labelling, minerals for manufacturing, and land, water, electricity and resources for data centres, primarily enabling the growth of American Big Tech?
Since the summit in February, India has sanctioned land for data centres displacing communities, triggering protests. There are no meaningful guardrails to protect local communities as American companies scrape public content to build language and indigenous knowledge datasets. The non-profit ecosystem is signing memoranda of understanding to diffuse AI and adopt use cases. However, fundamental AI innovation has been slow — India remains unable to compete with global foundational models, its semiconductor development is focused on low-value assembly and there is a question of adequate capital to invest and grow the national AI ecosystem.
But perhaps all is not lost for India. The first of a two-part UN Global Dialogue on AI is underway in Geneva (July 6-7, 2026). Stakeholders will convene to discuss how the multilateral and multistakeholder ecosystem can come together to collectively define the rules for the governance of AI.
A window for leadership
India can use the opportunity to stitch together a fractured AI policy agenda that currently lacks a leader. It remains one of the few countries with the political heft, the technical capacity, and a diverse market to play this role. Rather than positioning itself merely as a destination for investment or a market for AI, India could reassert a vision of technological development rooted in public purpose, user safety, strategic autonomy, and international cooperation.
India should reiterate the need for international norms that empower Global South countries to focus on building local AI ecosystems and fostering innovation, safeguarding users, enhancing regulatory capacity, enabling skilling and developing domestic infrastructure. It should also advance critical debates on competition and consumer protection and ensure economic value accrues within national markets.
Concurrently, India must create pathways for international cooperation on AI within the Global South. The Geneva dialogue is a critical moment for Global South countries to come together to enable enhanced agency and strategic autonomy.
This requires developing innovative approaches to pool capacity and resources including cooperation on data, compute, interoperable standards and shared protocols and governance, and strengthening institutional capacity both regulatory and technical across the Global South.
As heterogeneous as the Global South is, it can be a counterweight to the hegemony of Big Tech. India can lead this march to ensure that shared governance norms are created and benefits are shared with the people in the Global South, appropriately protecting them from harm.
Jhalak M. Kakkar is Executive Director, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University Delhi. Astha Kapoor is the Co-founder and Director of the Aapti Institute
Published – July 07, 2026 12:08 am IST
